


If You’re Gone, Maybe it’s Time To Come Home

by Emjen_Enla



Series: That's what we do. We never stop fighting. [1]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Depression, F/M, Gen, Inej is off hunting slavers, Kaz needs to learn to ask for help, M/M, Most decidedly NOT fluff, Nothing on Archive warning level but read the tags and use your best judgment, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Post-Crooked Kingdom, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-06-08 14:44:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15245631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: (There’s an awful lot of breathing room, but I can hardly move) Or Kaz goes into a downward spiral after Crooked Kingdom.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This is a repost from my fanfiction.net account. I've made a couple small changes (mostly sentence rewording and the spelling of one of the OCs names), but its still the same story as it was there. I'll be posting it in sections over the next week or two.
> 
> I don't own Six of Crows. Title is from "If You’re Gone" by Matchbox 20.

Part One

(1)

After they beat Jan Van Eck and Pekka Rollins, everything and nothing changes.

Kaz is now king of the Barrel, though of course, the rest of the gangs haven’t figured it out yet. Everyone is expecting Rollins to eventually dig his way out of the hole he’s fallen into. The rumor of him on his knees at Kaz’s feet is spreading through the Barrel like wildfire, but Rollins has been in power for so long that no one can fathom the idea that his time as ruler might be over. However, Kaz knows that it’s only a matter of time before that minor annoyance is rectified.

He also has four million  _ kruge _ slowly siphoning into his accounts. Between that and the shares of the Crow Club and Fifth Harbor that he bought off Haskell, he figures he’s easily one of the richest people in the Barrel. Not bad for a person who was flat broke two weeks before.

Still he makes the rest of the people involved in the Ice Court job keep the payoff quiet. It won’t do any of them any good for people to realize just how much  _ kruge _ they’re each rolling in. Kaz has built his life around stealing from the ridiculously wealthy and he’d rather not become one of those pigeons for some other angry upstart.

He should be ecstatic, even with the Council of Tides breathing down his neck, but he’s not. Firstly, Inej is leaving. He’s not surprised and he’s not going to try to stop her. He understands why she needs to go, he just…wishes she wouldn’t.

Inej and her parents stay for a few days so Inej can show them around Ketterdam. She’s always with them so Kaz tries to say out of their way. Being around Mr. and Mrs. Ghafa makes him nervous. He’s not positive, but he’s pretty sure that Inej’s parents know exactly how he feels about her. (He shouldn’t be surprised, nothing says “I’m completely and totally, illogically in love with your daughter” like “I bought her a ship so she can go fulfil her purpose in life.”) That transparency makes him feel uncomfortable in his own skin. He’s not ashamed of what he is, but he knows that he’s not the kind of boy that the Ghafas want their daughter to end up with.

(Will he and Inej end up together? He’s not even sure.)

He tries to tell himself that Inej is the only thing bothering him, but if he’s truly honest with himself Matthias is weighing heavily on his mind as well.

Though it’s a truth he’ll take it to his grave, he was not completely surprised by Matthias’s death. He’d considered hundreds of possible scenarios for the auction scheme and he’d known going in that the chances that at least one of them wouldn’t make it out where much higher than he would have liked. He’d also known that after Kuwei, he and Matthias had the worst odds of them all. If something went wrong, the rest of the gang had a chance of being able to vanish underground and wait things out. He and Matthias would be forever chased by the powerful people who wanted them dead.

Still, he hadn’t mentioned any of that to Matthias. He’d told himself that he didn’t want to risk Matthias backing out, but he’d known that Matthias would never back out while Nina was still in danger. There had been no excuse. Perhaps telling Matthias about the dangers would have saved his life, perhaps it wouldn’t have (they still aren’t sure what had happened, though Kaz has his theories). Either way, the idea of Matthias going to his death knowing it was a possibility makes things seem a little better.

Kaz has lost crewmembers before, but somehow Matthias weighs on him heavier than all those others. The night after the auction, after he left Van Eck’s— _ Wylan’s _ —house, he returned to the Slat. He made a mug of the herbal tea Inej keeps around and makes after big jobs when he feels like crud because of sheer exhaustion and is doing a poor job at hiding it. He couldn’t get it to taste right so he corrupted it with a double dose of a painkilling tonic and couple shots of whiskey because why not. Then he downed the whole vile-tasting thing in a couple gulps. His stomach was empty so the concoction hit him hard and knocked him out in a matter of minutes. He slept until late the next morning and expected to wake up feeling more like his normal self, but he didn’t.

He hadn’t felt quite right since then either, but it would be okay. He’d had low times before and he always snapped out of them.

It would be okay.

(2)

Inej leaves long, long before he’s ready. The night before the  _ Wraith _ is due to leave, she shows up at the Slat and they spend a night wandering the city, just like they did before the Ice Court. Kaz leaves his gloves off and tries not to flinch when people come to close. Inej pretends not to notice when he fails.

“So how exactly are you planning to catch these slavers?” he asks while they’re walking down an empty street.

“Well, first I’m taking my parents back to Ravka,” Inej says. “I want to see the rest of my family again, plus they’ll need a ride back. While I’m there I might try to add to the crew. Papa says that I have a couple cousins who might be interested in signing on and after the war there are a lot of purposeless Grisha in Ravka. After that, I start looking for slavers.”

“And how are you going to find them?” he asks.

“Well, I know there’s a slaver hideout somewhere between here and Ravka,” she says. “I don’t have the crew or experience to take it now, but knowing where it is will help me to intercept individual ships.”

He nods and they’re quiet for a couple more minutes while he considers if he really wants to do this.

“I’ve thought about what you said about catching slavers,” he says after what feels like an age.

“Really?” she looks at him. Her expression is passably neutral, but he knows her well enough to see the tension.

“I’ll help you,” he says before he loses his nerve.

A huge grin spreads across Inej’s face. She moves like she’s going to hug him and he leaps out of the way, wrenching his bad leg. The smile fades as she realizes what just happened. Her arms drop back to her side and her lips press together. “Thank you very much,” she says formally.

The mood never quite recovers from that.

(3)

More people show up to see the  _ Wraith _ off than Kaz anticipated. He hadn’t realized Inej had integrated herself so well into the Dregs. Even people like Beatle and Swann who tried to literally beat Kaz’s brains out a few weeks before are there. A small group of people crowd the dock to see Inej and her crew off.

Kaz leaves his gloves on. The crowd isn’t big by Ketterdam standards, but the dock is narrow enough that people bump and brush up against each other. He knows that if he tried to go barehanded he’d probably end up having one of his episodes like the one in the prison cart. (He knows what the proper name for those is, but he feels less pathetic and weak when he doesn’t think of them by that term.)

He waits until everyone else has finished saying goodbye to Inej before he approaches her. They stand there, staring at each other, neither knowing what to say, how they should part.

“Remember to write,” Inej says. Perhaps that sounds sweet to someone who doesn’t know that they ended last night by coming up with a plan on how he can get letters to her and an overly complicated code so he can send her information without blowing his involvement. There’s nothing romantic about her telling him to write; it’s just business.

He wishes it wasn’t. He wishes he could tell her he loves her. He wishes he could throw his arms around and hold her until she agrees to stay here with him. He wishes he could kiss her just so he could know what it’s like.

Instead he nods stoically, showing no hint of any of his desires. “I will,” he says and the promise is too audible in his voice so he goes on with something cutting, “And try not to get killed. It would be a waste of perfectly good  _ kruge _ I spend on that ship.”

Her expression is somewhere between fond and disappointed. When she speaks again, her voice has dropped to a near whisper. “Kaz, about last night-”

He does not want to talk about this ever, let alone in front of all these people. “Wraith-”

“Kaz,” she cuts in her voice rising slightly, but when she next speaks her voice is quiet again. “Don’t give up hope, okay? Just keep trying. It’ll get better.” Then she reaches out, takes his gloved hand and squeezes.

He doesn’t know how to respond to that, but he finds himself nodding stiffly and squeezing her hand back. They stand like that for a couple seconds. He can feel the gazes of the other people burning into him. He’s uncomfortably aware that for most of these people this is probably the first time they’ve seen him touch someone in a way that isn’t violent.

He pulls away first and steps back to put a little more space between them. “No mourners,” he says because he doesn’t know how to put words to what he actually wants to say.

“No funerals,” she says. “Take care of yourself, Kaz.”

When he doesn’t respond right away she turns away and heads up the ramp onto the  _ Wraith _ , leaving him in Ketterdam all alone.

“You too,” he says too quietly for anyone else to hear.

(4)

The next few weeks are busy ones. Kaz consolidates his control of the Dregs and begins to use his inside knowledge of the falsity of the plague scare to encroach on the territories of other gangs (namely Pekka Rollins’s). He begins searching for more spiders after it becomes obvious that Roeder won’t be able to fill Inej’s shoes on his own. He quietly starts tracking down slavers and their compatriots.

He’s very busy. Given that, if he’s eating and sleeping less than he should, that’s okay. If he’s drinking more coffee and whiskey than he probably should, that’s okay too. He’s a general now, not a lieutenant, he has more responsibilities than he did before (never mind that he was practically running the Dregs before the Ice Court job).

He’s not trying to ignore his stubbornly lingering guilt about Matthias. He’s definitely not trying to distract himself from the gaping hole in his heart and by his side where Inej is supposed to be. He’s fine. Just fine, thank you very much. There’s absolutely nothing wrong.

Nothing.

(5)

A month after the auction, Kaz pulls his first job as leader of the Dregs. There shouldn’t be much difference between this and any other job he’s ever done. After all, after the Ice Court and everything that happened afterwards, Kaz is pretty sure every job he’ll ever do should probably seem easy.

Still, no one knows about the Ice Court, and it doesn’t look like anyone ever will. This is his first job as leader of the Dregs and all the gang members in Ketterdam will be watching and waiting to see if he chokes.

That shouldn’t bother him, if anything it should make him more confident, but it does.

The job is a raid on a particularly rich mercher’s private jewel collection. It’s a job that requires a fairly small number of members (himself, Anika, Pim, Roeder and Minna, the thirteen-year-old Grisha Heartrender he’s letting try for a position as a spider). The job also doubles as a chance to look through the mercher’s records to see if the vague rumors he’s been hearing about the man being involved in the slave trade are accurate.

The break-in goes off without a hitch. The mercher and his family are still waiting out the “plague” in a summer home and it looks like the servants have taken this as an opportunity to take a paid vacation. Once inside, he leaves the others in the showroom to bag the jewels while he goes upstairs under the pretense of doing some reconnaissance. In reality, he picks the lock on the mercher’s office door and rifles through the man’s papers.

It takes him four and a half minutes to find the information he’s looking for. Yes, the man’s involved in the slave trade. Yes, he knows when the next shipment’s coming in. There aren’t any routes in the information, but there are locations of launches and when they’re supposed to come in. That information will be a start for Inej. It takes him three minutes to memorize the information, then he puts the office back the way he found it, locks the door again and gets back to the showroom before the others have time to start wondering what was taking him so long.

The rest of the job goes off without a hitch. They’re back in the Slat within a few hours a couple thousand  _ kruge _ richer. As soon as he’s sure everything’s settled and the jewels are locked up in the big safe that only he knows the combination to, Kaz retreats to his upstairs rooms (he can’t see himself taking over Per Haskell’s private rooms anytime soon). He lights a candle, gets out a sheet of paper and starts his first coded letter to Inej.

He takes all his self-control to focus on the business and not say anything pointless about how he’s been and how much he misses her.

(6)

He doesn’t get a return letter from Inej for almost a month and when one does come there’s a list of the ships they’d raided (mostly ones from that first list he’d sent her) and people rescued. Perhaps Kaz feels a little pride at knowing his information was put to good use, but mostly he wishes she’d have said a bit more about herself and how she was.

He forces those thoughts out of his head with a couple shots of whiskey, then sits down and writes her another completely impersonal letter about the new information he has for her.

(7)

Almost three months after Inej left, Kaz dreams that he’s in the harbor again, swimming for his life. It’s not that unusual an occurrence, especially now. He would have thought that his nightmares would have gotten better after he got his revenge on Pekka Rollins, but if anything, they’ve gotten worse.

Still none of that matters in this moment. He struggles to keep hold of the corpse under his arms and struggles to keep kicking towards the lights of Ketterdam which never seem to get any closer. His breaths burn in his throat, his teeth chatter from the cold, his chest is tight with fear.

A wave washes over his head. He almost loses his grip on the corpse but manages to pull himself back onto it at the last moment. He blinks saltwater out of his eyes, harsh breaths that are just a little like sobs ripping out of his body.

Then he looks down and realizes the corpse he’s clinging to isn’t Jordie’s but Inej’s.

He jolts back to reality in his bed in the Slat, blankets twisted around his legs, sweat soaking through his shirt and sticking it to his chest and back. He takes two heaving breaths before he turns and vomits over the side of the bed onto the floor.

When he’s done he collapses onto his side and twists his bare hands into the sheets. He’s been trying not to wear the gloves as much so he can surprise Inej if she comes back ( _ when _ she comes back, Kaz tells himself,  _ when _ ), but now he wishes he was wearing them. He’s sure that if he was just wearing the gloves he could deal with this, but they’re lying on his desk in the other room and he’s shaking too hard to make it in there to get them.

He curls up in a ball, biting the insides of his cheeks so hard he tastes blood. He stares at the opposite wall until his vision starts to tunnel. Images both from his memories and from the dream play over and over in his head. He can’t stop shaking.

He lies there, almost too afraid to blink, as the night drags by and sunlight starts to slowly creep into the room.

The sun is quite high by the time he’s able to get up and go retrieve his gloves.

(8)

Inej comes back to Ketterdam two weeks later. Kaz meets her on the dock under the pretense of having just been passing by. He can tell she doesn’t believe his excuse, but he finds that he doesn’t really care. He’s just happy to be near her again. Her quiet, steady presence relaxes and completes him, he feels more like himself than he has in months. Which is relieving, but also a little scary, mostly because he hadn’t realized, or at least allowed himself to admit, he wasn’t feeling right until it stopped.

“So, you managed not to die or destroy my investment,” he says jerking his head at the  _ Wraith _ .

Her smile is superficially fond, but he can see disappointment underneath it, she was expecting a different welcome. Her eyes shift to his hands, encased in his gloves. She doesn’t say anything but he knows what she wants.

“Sorry,” he says beginning to peel the gloves off. “Forgot.” His stomach clenches into a series of knots. He’s been wearing his gloves constantly since the nightmare, because the thought of that happening again gives him cold sweats. He feels ashamed; he really wanted to be less reliant on the gloves the next time they saw each other.

He doesn’t mention any of this as he tucks his gloves into his coat, careful not to let his hands shake. Inej is studying him, with her head cocked to the side. He expects her to have noticed his nerves, but what she says is, “You look tired.”

He doesn’t know how to tell her that he’s been trying to avoid sleeping as much as possible because he’s terrified of having a nightmare about clinging to her corpse, so he just gives her a thin smile. “Been busy.”

Now her smile is definitely fond, he feels like he’s floating. “You do know that even demons need to sleep, don’t you, Kaz?”

(9)

She leaves again long before he’s ready. Again, he wants to beg her to stay, again his bites his tongue and covers his true feelings with biting comments. Still he stands on the dock and watches until long after the  _ Wraith _ has vanished over the horizon. Though he’ll never admit it, he’s hoping she’ll realize that there’s more for her here with him than out at sea.

That’s ridiculous though, Inej is nothing if not a noble person. There are a lot of people in the world who need her way more than one demon-boy in the city of Ketterdam does.

By the time he heads back to Slat, a cold rain has started to fall.

(10)

Several months later, the Razorgulls start a gang war with the Dregs. People have been slowly realizing that Pekka Rollins is not coming back. That makes things more difficult for Kaz. He’s been slowly moving the Dregs into Rollins’s holdings since the plague scare. Up until this point, people have just been letting him, assuming that he’ll regret it once Rollins comes back. Now that it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, people realize that Kaz has been allowed to snag a huge amount of territory with little to no resistance.

The conflict with the Razorgulls comes down to a massive fight through the streets of the Barrel while the  _ stadwatch _ stands by helpless to control the violence. Torches light up the night until it’s nearly like day as Kaz chases the Razorgulls general through the alleys near the fighting.

He comes out into a dark dead end and the general is nowhere in sight. He has half a second to wonder where he went before the man leaps on him from behind wrapping his bare forearms around Kaz’s neck in a headlock.

The waters rise up before Kaz has time to breathe and he drops like a stone. Within instants the other general is on top of him, one bare hand around Kaz’s throat and the other punching him in the face. He is probably yelling, but Kaz can’t hear him over the ringing in his ears.

Kaz can’t breathe, he can’t think. He struggles against the weight of the body on top of him, looking for a way out. Eventually he gets his fingers around one of his hidden knives and stabs it into the other general’s stomach. The man’s grip loosens and Kaz is able to shove him off. He finishes the job, then collapses against a wall gasping.

He waits until he’s no longer shaking like a Grisha on  _ parem _ before he drags the general’s body up onto a high balcony above the main body of the battle. He declares the war over and gives the Razorgulls an ultimatum: join the Dregs or die.

Unsurprisingly most of them opt to join the Dregs.

That surrender takes place a few hours before dawn but it’s still well into the afternoon by the time Kaz gets back to his rooms. He’s profoundly exhausted in a way he hasn’t been since the Ice Court and he can’t quite shake the tremors from the memory of someone else’s hands around his neck. He collapses onto his bed and loses his grip on the world.

He wakes up late the next morning by Anika pounding on his door with a list of questions, as exhausted as he was when he fell asleep.

(11)

The surrender of the Razorgulls nearly doubles the size of the Dregs. Granted, it’ll be awhile before he can actually trust any of these new recruits, but the Barrel runs on strength and Kaz is confident he can win them all over given time.

One of the more interesting new members is a scrawny eleven-year-old boy. He’s newly orphaned and worked cleaning chamber pots in one of the Razorgulls’ hideouts. His name is Espen and his eyes gleam with the same cold, calculating anger Kaz sees in himself every time he looks in a mirror.

Perhaps Kaz should take Espen under his wing and attempt to put the boy back together in a way better than the way he put himself together. Perhaps he would if he was a better person. Perhaps he would if the mere thought of putting up with another person’s issues on top of his own wasn’t utterly exhausting.

So, he doesn’t try to help. Instead his foists the kid on Minna and tells her to teach him to be a spider instead.

Maybe that will be enough.

(12)

His letters to Inej are starting to get out of hand.

Not the ones he actually sends to her; those are just as impersonal as always. It’s the drafts of those letters that are starting to become problematic.

They’ve gotten long.

Kaz has always been a master of brevity when it comes to letters. He can normally fit anything he could possibly need to say to anyone into under a page. His average letter is only a couple sentences.

The drafts of his letters to Inej go on for pages and pages.

His words scrawl across the paper, rambling in ways that don’t seem like him, and to make matters worse, he’s not really talking about anything. He does talk about the Dregs and Ketterdam news sometimes, but mostly he just talks about how much he misses her and begs her to come back and stay with him.

He realizes that this is getting beyond ridiculous the night he writes almost thirty pages of a logical, step-by-step argument for why she should abandon her quest to bring justice to the slavers and return to being his spider.

He stares at the letter for a long time, a strange feeling of disgust and fear swirling inside him. He can’t possibly send something like this to Inej. Hunting slavers is her purpose, and she will keep doing it no matter what. All this letter would do is guarantee that she really will never come back.

He crumbles the letter into a ball and throws it into the fire. Then he starts another draft. He intends for this one to be a short, to-the-point passing of information, but somehow it devolves into an even longer argument. This one is about how he is a horrible, corrupt person with no hope for anything better and how Inej would really be better off if she left him behind and never looked back.

The sun has risen by the time he finishes this letter. He sits at his desk and stares blankly at the letter. He imagines that a normal person would probably be crying right now, but there are no tears for him. There haven’t been since that night in the harbor all those years ago. It’s like something about that night locked all his tears up somewhere inside him and threw away the key. He hasn’t been able to cry since, even as an act.

So, his eyes are dry as he looks at the letter, but his chest is tight. He has never hated himself, never felt a sliver of shame about what he is, but he feels it now. If only he wasn’t like this, maybe Inej wouldn’t have left him. Sure, she’s come back a couple times, but how long will it be before she realizes how much better off she is without him in her life and stops coming back? How long before she leaves him completely alone?

The sunlight creeps into his room. The Slat is coming awake around him. He has a million things to do. He’s the leader of the Dregs, he has everything as long as he does the things he needs to do. He knows that he needs to get moving, but he doesn’t want to. He’s empty and sad and so incredibly tired.

So, for the first time that he can remember, Kaz Brekker ignores his responsibilities, he shoves the letter aside, pillows his head on his arms and hopes things will be better when he wakes up.

They aren’t.

(13)

Kaz is tired.

He’s used to being tired—he has a tendency to ignore things like sleep when on big jobs in favor of other, more important things and doesn’t sleep a normal amount even when he’s not on jobs—but normally he can just slam a couple cups of coffee and be fine. This is something different. Even with his veins seemingly swimming with coffee, he still finds himself fighting against a deep-seated exhaustion. Even sleep doesn’t seem to shake it, even though he’s sleeping more than he normally does.

He tells himself that it’s no big deal. He knows that his sleeping habits are unhealthy, and if they’re finally catching up to him, Inej would probably say it’s for the best. It’s not like he’s sleeping an insane amount, anyway. If anything, he’s probably just sleeping a normal amount and it just seems like a lot because he’s not used to it. It will only take him some time to adjust.

Still, he is tired and it’s hard to care about any of the things that used to take up his full attention. He hasn’t destroyed the letter. He keeps it tucked carefully away in one of the drawers of his dresser, nestled among his ties and spare pairs of gloves. He takes it out and reads it sometimes, as a reminder of why he’s so lucky for the chances he’s had with Inej and why he should never expect too much.

(14)

He, Roeder, Minna and Espen are on a job. They get in easy enough, but while they’re bagging the man’s inappropriately stuffed safe, the owner of the house comes home. They all freeze in shock when they hear the front door open. Kaz had calculated that they had another hour and a half before the mercher came home from his mistress’ house. For a few blank seconds, all Kaz can think is “How was I so wrong?” then survival instincts kick in.

“Clear out,” he orders and they make for the windows.

They aren’t fast enough. Within minutes the  _ stadwatch _ are on their tails. They’re crossing over the river when one of the  _ stadwatch _ gets lucky and shoots Roeder. The oldest spider takes a dive over the edge of the bridge and into the water. Minna skids to a stop on the bridge and stares over. “Dirtyhands!” she yells (he has never heard her call him anything else, even Brekker) “You need to do something! Espen and I are too small!”

A voice whispers that he should just let Roeder die, but he needs Roeder. Roeder is the only one of the spiders who appears useful in a fight and he’s not about to lose the advantage that camouflage grants to Minna.

“Take care of the  _ stadwatch _ ,” he tells Minna giving her a look he hopes she interprets as orders to do it quietly. Then he thrusts his cane into Espen’s hands. “Be careful with that; it’s worth more than your life,” he says then vaults over the side of the bridge and into the water.

Kaz knows how to swim; he is honest enough about his own life to know that is a useful skill, but he doesn’t like it. The water in the river tonight is cold and the memory of the barge returns. Still he does his best to push it down and he swims to Roeder.

He grabs the back of the spider’s shirt and pulls him into his chest. He wraps his other arm around Roeder’s chest and almost immediately has one of the biggest flashbacks he’s ever had. He is nine years old in the harbor clinging to Jordie’s body, he has little to no recognition of ever being anything else. His head goes under and the only thing that keep him from shoving Roeder’s unconscious body away is the belief that he is Jordie and the only thing keeping him drowning.

His free hand strikes something hard. He grabs on and manages to drag his head above water. His mind is whirl of panic and revulsion. He knows that he needs to get out of the water, but the panic is so much that he can’t move.

When another hand clasps around his arm, he loses himself completely and trashes, letting go of whatever he was holding onto in an attempt to get away. The hand doesn’t let go, actually another joins it and jerks him to a stop just as his head goes under again.

The next moment his heart rate starts to slow and the edges of his panic fade. He realizes that his head is underwater and kicks until he’s above the water again and can get a gasp of air. His vision clears and he realizes the person attached to the hands holding his arm is Minna. She’s kneeling on the pier he grabbed onto, water sticking her mouse-brown hair to her face and her gray eyes wide. She’s using her abilities to lower his heart rate.

Minna helps him pull Roeder and himself out of the river and they drag the spider onto the shore together. Immediately, Minna pulls Roeder’s shirt open and positions her hands over his chest. Kaz knows that she’ll now use her powers to draw the water out of his lungs. She’ll do it carefully so no one knows exactly what she did. It’s still dangerous to be a Grisha in Ketterdam, so Minna keeps her powers carefully under wraps. Kaz isn’t even sure if Roeder and Espen know she’s a Heartrender. She would have been careful to find a very subtle way to incapacitate the  _ stadwatch _ when he ordered her to.

Kaz just wants to collapse and not move until he can breathe again, but the instant Minna starts tending to Roeder, Espen is in his face.

“What was that?” the little boy snarls with an expression that even Kaz will admit is slightly demonic. “What is wrong with you?”

“What are you talking about?” Kaz asks more to buy time than anything else. He almost winces at how wrong his voice sounds; even more gravely than usual, undeniably shaky.

“You were supposed to save Roeder, not freeze and make Minna pull you out!” Espen has his face in very close to Kaz’s, so close that flecks of the boy’s spit hit Kaz’s cheeks. “What kind of general are you?”

Kaz wants to pull away and put miles of distance between himself and every other human being in Ketterdam, but he forces himself to react to Espen’s taunts and closeness in the way that helped to earn him his reputation, the way that will save face.

He punches the kid in the jaw.

Espen, for all his bravado, does not know how to take a punch. The kid goes sprawling across the ground, gasping. Minna looks on in surprise. Kaz takes a fortifying breath and stands up even though his legs feel no more solid than the water he almost drowned in both tonight and all those years ago.

“You really should learn that you’re not in charge here,” he tells Espen, keeping his voice steady through sheer force of will. “You only have a place in this gang because the good you do outweighs the annoyance of putting up with you. Understand?”

Espen is staring. For once, he’s actually wearing an expression other than anger. He looks shocked and a little scared. His mouth opens and closes mutely.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Kaz snarls. “Now, what did you do with my cane?”


	2. Part Two

Part Two

(15)

Even though the raid was a disaster, Kaz is able to overcome it in the next few weeks. He and the spiders do not discuss it, and if Espen treats everyone with a bit more vitriol than usual, no one mentions it.

Kaz is still tired, though, and he’s been having an increasingly hard time focusing on his responsibilities. He knows that he is general of the Dregs and his work is important, but it’s starting to seem so pointless. What does it matter if someone makes that con artist pay up or tells that gang to back off? In the long run Ketterdam will go on just as it always has, and Kaz is just too tired to deal with any of it. It’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning.

Things come to a head the day that he falls asleep at the desk in his—formerly Per Haskell’s—office. He’s been feeling hopeless with the situation with the Black Tips and worrying about Inej. She’s been gone a long time, and while he knows from her letters that she’s alright she hasn’t said anything about when she’ll next be back. After so long, he can’t quite choke the fear that she isn’t going to come back. That she’s finally realized that she doesn’t need him in her life.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep and is woken by a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Panic surges, and lashes out at the person who dares to touch him.

Anika leaps back, her hands raised, fear on her face. “Sorry, Boss,” she says. “I just…That mercher is here to see you. The one we’re working for that grain scam.”

“Oh,” Kaz says, his panic fading. He kicks himself for the faint, half-aware tone of his voice. He glances at the clock on the wall next to the door and wonders how long he’s been asleep. He rubs a gloved hand over his face, trying to pull himself into some semblance of wakefulness. “Give me five minutes, then send him in.”

“Okay, Boss,” Anika says, but she doesn’t leave.

“What?” he asks, giving her a look.

“Nothing…” she says, then rubs the back of her neck. “It’s just that…I’ve never seen you sleep before.”

Kaz growls and ignores the unspoken question. Anika does not have the right to wonder if he’s alright. No one has that right. He is Dirtyhands, the Bastard of the Barrel; he doesn’t need people’s sympathy. “Go do your job, Anika.”

(16)

When Inej next comes back it’s all he can do to keep from dropping everything and  _ running _ to the docks to meet her. He wants to see her so badly; he’s so sure that everything will be alright now that she’s back.

Still, he forces himself to tie everything up neatly and walks to the docks. Inej is helping unload the boat. Her hair is tied back in a long braid and she looks well. He stands on the edge of the berth, watching. He can barely wrap his mind around how lucky he is that this perfect human being came back here to him.

But what if she wasn’t here for him? The uncertainty takes him off-guard. Kaz has never worried about whether or not someone wants to see him. In fact, he normally operates under the assumption that everyone he knows and interacts with would be happier if he just vanished from the universe. Inej is the only person he’s always thought genuinely liked him being around.

Now he thinks of that letter in his drawer and wonders if he completely misjudged her. What if she is just like everyone else? What if she just puts up with him because it’s easier than telling him how she really feels? What if she sees him waiting for her and wishes she’d stayed at sea so she wouldn’t have to deal with him?

He feels shaky, and he’s having a hard time breathing. That doesn’t make any sense because he’s wearing his gloves. He stretches his fingers so he can feel the leather pulling. That normally helps, but right now it doesn’t. He promised Inej that he’d remove his armor for her and he’s failing. He used to be able to take his gloves off and do his office work, maybe deal a card game if he had a couple shots of whiskey to fortify himself first. Now the thought of taking the gloves off to wash his face has started making him anxious. He’s not getting better, he’s getting worse by the day. How is he supposed to convince Inej to keep coming back if he has nothing to offer her?

He’s so wrapped up in anxiety, that he doesn’t approach Inej. He stands in the shadows at the end of the berth and watches while the crew filters away to enjoy being on land. At last, Inej locks up, says goodbye to the unlucky crewmember stuck on guard duty and wanders down the berth. Kaz wonders where she’s planning to go. The Slat maybe? To see him?

_ Presumptuous. _ He scolds himself. Why would she want to go see him right after landing? There are a million other people in this city who are far, far better company than he’ll ever be.

Inej almost walks right by the place where he’s standing before she stops and turns to him. Her eyes narrowing in an expression that he knows is probably confusion but a loud part of his mind suggests is really disgust or disappointment. “Kaz?” she asks. “How long have you been standing there?”

Kaz shrugs in an attempt to seem casual. His heart is pounding so loudly he can hear it, and his palms are slick with sweat inside his gloves. “Not long,” he says in what he hopes is a level voice.

“You could have come down to the ship,” Inej says. “You didn’t have to stand here in the dark. Is everything okay?”

He’s surprised by how much he wants to say that everything’s not okay, but if he did Inej would ask him to explain what’s wrong and he’s not sure he can. Besides even if he could find the words he’s deathly afraid that outright telling Inej that he thinks she doesn’t really care about him would just drive her away even faster. “Everything’s fine,” he says instead and feels like he’s trying to swallow sawdust.

“Okay,” Inej says. Then her eyes drop significantly to his gloved hands. What she wants is obvious.

His lungs tighten until he can barely breathe. He knows that he needs to take the gloves off to show Inej that he cares about her and that he’s trying for her, but he’s nearly positive that if he tries to take the gloves off now, he’ll simply collapse and lose his hold on himself completely. The gloves  _ help _ , he knows they do and he  _ needs _ them. They’re the only thing that helps him keep a grip on his own humanity.

He looks away and pretends he didn’t see Inej’s look.

(17)

He and Inej spend a couple days going about things like old times. They creep on rich merchers and eat fried potatoes while walking through the streets. Kaz feels better, not quite right, per se, but he can push aside the little voice that says Inej doesn’t really want anything to do with him and enjoy just being near her.

He should have known it was too good to last.

Inej has been back for about two days when things fall apart. They’re sitting on the roof outside of one of Kaz’s safehouses, going through the details of the information they’ve just learned about a group of slavers. Suddenly, Inej grows quiet. Kaz is just about to ask her what’s wrong when she reaches out and lays a hand on top of one of his gloved ones. He can’t help it, he tenses.

“You know, I haven’t seen you take these off once since I’ve been back,” she says slowly, carefully.

Kaz inwardly curses himself. A year ago, she probably wouldn’t have said anything, but this new Inej is braver. She’s no longer afraid to speak; the Ice Court only made her stronger while he’s pretty sure it did the exact opposite for him.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he just shrugs.

Inej heaves a sigh. “Listen, Kaz,” she says. “We had a deal. ‘I will have you without your armor, or I will not have you at all,’ remember? You need to put in the effort, Kaz. I can’t do everything in this relationship; you have to meet me halfway.”

He should say something, but he doesn’t.

“Kaz,” Inej says sounding a little bit sharper than before. “If things are too close to the surface right now and you need time, that’s okay. But you need to tell me. You can’t just keep expecting me to let you get away with things. You need to communicate with me, Kaz.”

He looks at her out of the corner of his eyes. He imagines telling her what has been going on. He imagines saying,  _ “Inej, I think something’s wrong with me; I don’t feel like myself anymore.” _ He can feel the shape of the words on his tongue and opens his mouth in the hope that they’ll just come out, but they don’t. The silence drags on and on.

“Kaz,” Inej says sharply. “I’m not going to put up with this. You can’t just treat me like your timid little Wraith. I’m not that girl anymore. You can’t expect me to just put up with you without you doing anything in return. This isn’t a business partnership, this is a relationship, and if you want this to go anywhere you need to step up and do your part.”

Each of her words feels like a knife buried deep in his stomach. She’s going to leave. He was right, he really is a horrible, wrong person who no one can stand to be around. Inej really does deserve better than him. He can’t even take off a pair of gloves for her.

All he has to do is take the gloves off. If he took the gloves off he could possibly appease her and she could be convinced to stay, but he can’t. His chest is a vice and he can feel the water around his legs. He needs to take the gloves off, but he can’t. He can’t. He can’t. He can’t, and he’ll never be able to. He has failed.

He says nothing and does nothing. He simply keeps staring out at the roofs of Ketterdam. Inej makes a soft, disgusted sound and gets up. She takes a couple steps away then stops and he hears her turn back to him. “When you finally learn to swallow your pride, Kaz, we’ll talk,” she says and starts to walk away again.

He wants to call her back, to say something—anything—to make her stay, but the words catch in her throat. She’s right about everything. He is not worthy of anything even remotely connected to her. So, he says nothing and she leaves him sitting on the rooftop all alone.

They don’t speak again before she leaves Ketterdam.

(18)

A year ago, the argument (if it can even be called that since he didn’t say a word) wouldn’t have caused Kaz any substantial pause. A year ago, Kaz was secure in the knowledge that Inej would come back eventually because she had nowhere else to go. Now he no longer has that luxury. Inej has the whole world laid out before with nothing to tie her to Ketterdam but a bunch of bad memories and a boy who can’t be the person she deserves.

So, Kaz knows that his relationship with Inej is over. She will not return to Ketterdam again. He will never see her again. He has ruined the one relationship he still had left.

He tries to take this reality in stride and go on with his life, but he can’t. He feels empty and so completely alone, even more so than he did after Jordie. When Jordie died, Kaz had his thirst for revenge to keep him company. Now he is on the top with his revenge and nothing but the seemingly bottomless hole of sadness opening up inside him.

He realizes that most people will see this as exactly what he deserves. He spent almost half his life chasing money and revenge and now that he has them he discovers how empty and broken his life really is. In fact, even he’ll admit that this probably exactly what he deserves.

That doesn’t make getting on with things any easier. It’s become near impossible to get out of bed in the morning. Waking up at ten bells is now early for him and it takes him even longer to work up the energy to drag himself out of bed. Once he’s actually up, he has a hard time focusing. All he wants to do is go back to bed and sleep for the rest of his life.

(19)

Time passes in an incomprehensible blur. Inej still sends him information about her movements so he figures their business arrangement isn’t over yet and keeps sending her information on slavers.

One afternoon, he’s attempting to focus on the Crow Club’s profits when Anika comes in with an envelope. He doesn’t look up, he just keeps on scribbling another calculation on a spare bit of paper (he used to be able to do all these calculations in his head but he’s just too tired to try these days). He expects Anika to just set the envelope on his desk and leave, but she doesn’t. She sets it right on top of his hand then steps back and crosses her arms.

Kaz looks from the envelope to her and raises his eyebrows.

“I’m going to watch you read it,” she says.

“You know I am capable of reading my own correspondence without someone looking over my shoulder,” he snaps.

“Sure,” Anika shoots back. “Just not in any semblance of timeliness.”

They both look to the stack of unopened mail on the edge of Kaz’s desk. He used to open every piece of mail he got, even the useless stuff. Now he the mere thought of opening the important stuff exhausts him.

He also doesn’t have anywhere near enough energy to continue arguing with Anika, so he just opens the envelope and pulls out a small invitation. It’s from Wylan. Inej is returning to Ketterdam soon, and Wylan and Jesper are planning a party to celebrate all the success she’s had so far.

“You’ll go, won’t you?” Anika asks, sounding more like an anxious schoolgirl than a lieutenant of the most powerful gang in Ketterdam.

“Why does it matter if I go or not?” he asks, turning the invitation over and over in his gloved fingers. He knows that he won’t go. He doesn’t want to force people to interact with him because they’re scared of what he’ll do (that’s what drives everyone’s interactions with him, he can see that now), and he doesn’t think he could handle seeing Inej.

There’s a long pause, then Anika says, “What’s wrong, Brekker?” she sounds a little fed-up but mostly surprisingly worried.

Kaz finds it in himself to raise an eyebrow at her. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t been acting right for months,” she says, “and it’s getting worse. We’re worried about you.”

Her words form a block of ice in Kaz’s stomach. “Define ‘we,’” he says slowly.

“Everyone,” Anika says. “Me, Keeg, Pim, Roeder, Dirix, Rotty, Minna. Everyone.”

Kaz’s fists clench. He thought he’d been doing a decent enough job at pretending to be okay. If he’s failing that means those close to him know how shamefully weak he’s become. That means that someone in the Dregs is probably plotting his downfall right now. He’s going to lose the Dregs if he doesn’t get his act together fast.

“Thank you for your concern,” he tells Anika flatly. “But that’s really not any of your business.”

(20)

A couple days before Jesper and Wylan’s party he’s going with the spiders to do some reconnaissance for a big job they’re planning. Kaz finishes the last of his meetings with time to spare and makes his way up to his rooms to eat supper in peace.

It’s only seven bells in the evening, but he’s already flagging. He’s tired, sad and inexplicably hopeless about the job as a whole. On top of it all, he has absolutely no appetite and hasn’t in weeks. He stirs his stew listlessly while trying to talk himself into actually eating. He hasn’t had anything today but coffee. He’s going to need his strength for tonight, but he’s just doesn’t want to eat…

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he knows he must have because the next thing he knows he’s blinking awake to a significantly darker room and Espen in his face.

“You’re just taking a nap?” Espen snarls leaning in close. “What is wrong with you? Roeder, Minna and I have been waiting for over an hour!”

Kaz blinks at him. He feels groggy and can’t quite get his thoughts to line up. He wants to go back to sleep.

“Are you listening to me?” Espen literally lunges forward and shoves Kaz out of his chair and onto the floor. “This is ridiculous! You’re supposed to be leading this gang not taking naps whenever you feel like it!”

Espen’s bare hands are twisted into Kaz’s shirt and pressing against his neck sickeningly. Kaz has been caught half asleep and in a poor state of mind. In another time, he might have just been able to throw Espen off and go on with things, but tonight he can’t. His chest seizes up and the water surges around him. He struggles fruitlessly against Espen.

“Get off me!” he shrieks. His voice sounds strange. It takes him a moment to realize that not only does he sound as hysterical as he feels, his accent has changed. He’s spent years training himself to speak like a Ketterdam native, and now his natural Southern Kerch farmer’s accent sounds wrong.

The change in accent must surprise Espen too because the boy jerks back. Kaz shoves him off and scoots away until his back hits the wall near the fireplace. He knows it looks pathetic, but he’s shaking so hard he knows Espen can see it. The room feels to small and to bright, and it swirls around him. His stomach churns, and his heart pounds like it’s trying to escape his chest. He can’t  _ breathe _ , he can barely think.

Espen steps closer. “Boss?” he sounds scared, like he can’t figure out why Kaz is so disgustingly weak. “What’s wrong? Do you need a medik?”

Kaz swallows back nausea and manages to get in enough breath of a breath that he can speak. “Get away from me,” he says.

Espen jerks back in surprise. “What?”

“Get out of here,” Kaz tries for his Dirtyhands snarl, but he still can’t breathe and his voice comes out audibly shaky. A small part of him is thankful that at least his Ketterdam accent is back. “Go downstairs and tell Anika and Pim that you’ve been demoted. Have them put you cleaning chamber pots in one of the smaller gambling halls, or they can just kick you out, I don’t care which. Just never, ever come near me again. If you do, I swear I’ll find some very painful and humiliating way to kill you.”

He’s vaguely aware that he probably shouldn’t be saying stuff like that to Espen. Kaz and Espen are just a little too much alike and there’s a part of Kaz that is terrified of the kid finding reason to focus his anger on Kaz. Kaz does not want to become Espen’s Pekka Rollins. Still his panic is all-consuming. He just wants Espen gone. He doesn’t care what he has to deal with later as long as the kid is gone  _ now _ .

Espen backs away. He looks terrified, like he’s not sure what to do next. “Ummm...I…”

“Get out,” Kaz orders around a breath that sounds just a little too much like a sob.

Espen turns and flees.

(21)

The instant the door swings closed behind Espen, Kaz drags himself to his feet and stumbles across the room. He’s still having trouble breathing and he’s shaking so badly that he can barely stand. He nearly falls against the door and fumbles at the dozen or so locks he’s put on his door for security. The locks don’t make his room unbreachable, but it definitely makes getting in difficult. When all the locks are in place he does the same for the windows, pulling dark curtains over them. He even locks the window he habitually leaves unlocked for Inej; after all, it’s not like she’ll be coming back to visit anytime soon.

When his rooms are locked up as tightly as he can make it. He staggers over to his safe and opens it with shaking fingers. Inside amongst the ledgers and  _ kruge _ and jewelry and other valuables is a bottle of extremely expensive whiskey that was lifted from a mercher a couple months before the Ice Court job. It’s opened because he and Inej had a glass each the night they took it. They saved the rest because it’s not the kind of thing you drink wastefully.

Right now, Kaz doesn’t care how expensive it is. He grabs the bottle and slams the safe door behind him as he heads towards his bedroom. He pulls the horrible letter he wrote to Inej months ago out of his drawer and sinks onto his bed. He uncorks the bottle and pours a generous portion down his throat while he begins to read.

(22)

He reads the letter over and over and over as the bottle gets emptier and emptier. He doesn’t feel any less empty, though. He sits on the bed with his knees drawn up, rests his forehead against the letter and the bottle and just sits.

He can’t deal with an angry eleven-year-old. Can’t eat his supper and go do his job the way he’s supposed to. He can’t even take off a pair of gloves without freaking out. He is pathetic, no wonder Inej left him. He deserves it.

There’s a knock on the locked door. “Boss?” Anika. “What’s going on? Espen told Pim and I that you said—Well, I just want to hear it from you first. Is Espen overreacting?”

Kaz chokes back a snort. He wonders how he managed to convince Anika he couldn’t possibly have given that order. He wonders if Espen had mentioned that the Dregs’ fearsome general had been having a panic attack when he gave that order. Normally, Kaz would never use those words to describe what had happened, but he’s feeling pathetic enough right now to stop lying to himself.

Anika knocks on the door again. “Brekker? Boss! Are you in there?”

Kaz says nothing. Even if he wanted Anika to know he’s holed up in his rooms like a coward, he doesn’t think he’s sober enough to speak without slurring.

“Kaz, you better actually be in there,” Anika says. “I’d feel really stupid if I was just standing out here talking to an empty room.”

He doesn’t say anything. Eventually Anika leaves and something snaps inside him. 

He looks down at the letter then hurls it across the room. It falls on the floor in a flutter of pages. He’s on his feet almost before they settle. He crosses to his dresser and sweeps the clutter on top it onto the floor with an arm. He does the same with the small table that his washbasin sits on. He throws the pitcher at a wall where is shatters and rains to the floor in a shower of glass and water.

He knows he’s being ridiculous. He’s always hated people who get drunk and do stuff like this, but he doesn’t know how to stop. He knows that busting up his room isn’t getting him anywhere, and it’s not making him feel better, but he needs to do something.

He stumbles to his bed and collapses onto it. The mostly empty bottle of whiskey rolls out of his fingers and onto the floor. He buries his face in his pillow, wraps his arms around it, and tries to hang on.

(23)

He’s thinking about the farm. He hasn’t done that in years. Even when he bought the place as Johannus Rietveld he barely let himself think about it. The farm is like a distant dream so faded by time it’s not worth giving mental energy to.

But he’s thinking about it tonight. He thinks about the rolling hills and the dark earth of the fields. The apple trees where he learned to climb and the barn where he’d race Jordie up and down from the loft.

Slowly, floating on a haze of drunken sadness, Kaz allows his mind wander away from the farm itself and onto the people who lived there. He thinks about Jordie all the time, but he hasn’t thought about Buck—the huge black-and-tan dog they’d had—in years, not since he learned that the dog died around the same time as Jordie. Now, he thinks about how Buck was fierce to strangers, but would lay by the fire and let Kaz lean against him when it was just the family.

He hasn’t thought about his mother in even longer than Buck. She died when he was about five so he probably shouldn’t actually remember her, but Kaz has always had an impeccable memory. He remembers clinging her long skirts, and her humming while she worked. The memory of her feels like a punch to the gut.

Then there’s his father. Thinking of him brings back recollections of a big, tired man with calloused but gentle hands. He was the same kind of fool that Jordie had been, in crushing debt because he had horrible luck and was too trusting. Still, that hadn’t stopped him from trying to give his sons the best of everything and promising that everything would work out right until the moment that he’d been run over by his own plow.

Thinking that brings back the memory of that horrible day. Kaz remembers standing ankle-deep in the tilled soil of the field staring at the carnage and screaming like the soft farm kid he’d been. That’s all he remembers of his father’s death: blood, gore and his own voice screaming and screaming and screaming.

He wraps his arms tighter around the pillow and clenches his teeth.  _ Stop thinking about it, stop thinking about it, stop thinking about it. _

It’s too late. His head is full of memories of people he’s been trying to forget about for years. Memories swirl around them, that old grief mixing with his new grief about Inej. He’s  _ sad _ . So very, very sad.

He misses them.

He misses everyone. Inej and Jordie and Buck and his mother and father. He misses the farm. He misses Kaz Rietveld: the stupid, naïve kid who believed that people were good and that he was good and that things would someday work out.

He wishes he could go back to that, but he knows he couldn’t. He’s done too much. Even if his parents and Jordie were still alive like Inej’s are, he couldn’t go back. He’s not like Inej—bruised but still herself—he has become something else, something his parents and Jordie would hate and revile. There will be no salvation for the boy who had once been Kaz Rietveld, he’d burned and destroyed every path that might lead anywhere but his own damnation.

His shoulders hitch and a sob rips out of his mouth. His cheeks are wet, and the sensation is so strange it takes him a couple minutes to realize he’s crying for the first time in years. He presses his face into the pillow to try to stop it, but he can’t. He just sobs.

He wishes someone would come and comfort him the way his father used to back on the farm, but he knows that won’t happen. He is Dirtyhands and no one comforts Dirtyhands. Besides, he’s too broken to even allow anyone to touch him. Who would even want to bother trying to deal with all that?

So, he stays curled up on the bed, wrapped around his pillow and cries alone until the Slat begins to wake up around him and he finally passes out from exhaustion.

(24)

When he wakes up next, it must be late in the day, though he’s not a hundred percent sure because the curtains block out most of the light. His head aches from a combination of crying and a hangover, and he feels washed-out and hopeless.

He shifts slightly and curls tighter around his pillow. He feels so alone, like he could vanish into the atmosphere right now and no one would ever notice. He wishes Anika would come back. He’s not sure if he would let her in, but he would like to hear her voice. He thinks that would help.

She doesn’t come. He clings to the pillow because it feels like it’s the only thing holding him together. He doesn’t want to let go. He’s afraid of what would happen if he did.

He should get up and go deal with the mess he made of both his room and his relations with his spiders, but he can’t find it in him to move. Does it really matter what he does? Maybe the world would really just keep spinning and he could just lie here until he feels like he’s in control of his life again.

Somehow, he manages to get his boots, coat, vest and tie off without letting go of his pillow. He slides under the blankets and curls up again. He closes his eyes and simply lets go.

(25)

Time passes. Kaz floats in and out of dull, heavy sleep. Sometimes he’s vaguely aware of people knocking on his door, but they don’t come in (can’t come in because of all the locks) and he doesn’t respond. It doesn’t matter. They’re just trying to figure out why he isn’t doing his job because as much as they’re afraid of him, they’re afraid of the Dregs seeming weak even more.

He is so alone and so sad and he wants someone to come comfort him, but he doesn’t know how to ask for help anymore and doesn’t trust anyone enough anyway. Well, he trusts Inej, but she deserves so much better than being wrapped up in his issues.

He hugs the pillow to his chest even more tightly. It’s the closest thing to a hug he’s likely to ever get and he tries to tell himself it's good enough. It’s not. It will never be, but he has to make do.

After all, who would ever want to do anything for the terrifying Dirtyhands?

 


	3. Part Three

Part Three

**(Inej)**

(1)

The Van Eck mansion is full to the brim of members of the Dregs. The irony is thick because a year ago, such people would never have been allowed on the same street.

Inej threads her way through the drinking gang members. They’re laughing and sharing stories. They’ve all been told that the party is to celebrate the Dregs’ rise to prominence as the most powerful gang in Ketterdam; only the Crows and a few extremely trusted others know that the party is actually in honor of Inej’s successes hunting slavers.

Even though the building is full of people, it still feels empty to Inej. The only Crows there aside from her are Jesper and Wylan. Kaz hasn’t yet appeared, and Matthias’s death still weighs heavily on her, not to mention the fact that it has caused Nina to drop off the face of the world. Inej has no idea where her friend is and no one has heard from her in months.

Inej has tried everything to find Nina, even picking Kaz’s brain in their coded letters (if anyone knows where Nina is, it’s him). However, it’s been months since Kaz mentioned anything even semi-personal in his letters. They were always impersonal, but since her last visit to Ketterdam, he hasn’t bothered to do anything but send her lists of information. She’s starting to think he’s still sulking about the talking-to she gave him the last time they saw each other. That bothers her, because while Kaz is totally capable of holding a grudge for a couple months (after all, he managed to hold one on Pekka Rollins for years), he’s never stayed mad at her for this long before.

(2)

It’s at least ten bells when she finally admits that she’s worried. This isn’t like Kaz. She’d thought that he’d at least show his face, even if that was only because Jesper and Wylan or Anika and Keeg dragged him along.

She eventually seeks out Anika who is sitting at a table playing a good-natured card game with Pim, Keeg, Dirix and Roeder while Rotty and a couple other high-ranking Dregs look on. They all look up when Inej steps up.

“’Lo, Wraith,” Dirix says. “Welcome back. You staying for good this time?”

“Please don’t,” Roeder says with a good-natured smile to show he’s joking. “I like my job, and I don’t want you to steal it back.”

“No, I’m not staying,” Inej says. “Just stopping by for a visit. If you enjoy scrambling over every dirty, smelly crevasse of this city doing Kaz’s bidding, you’re more than welcome to it.” The instant the words come out of her mouth she feels guilty; she had never minded being Kaz’s spider, even when he was in a mood.

Still the Dregs laugh. They are all high enough in the ranks to have personally dealt with Kaz enough to know just how frustrating putting up with his opaque orders and unfathomable schemes could be.

When the laughter dies Inej moves on to the real reason she came over by them. “Where is Kaz by the way? I know he doesn’t like parties, but I haven’t seen him at all since I got back.”

The table goes silent. The Dregs look back and forth at each other like they’re trying to decide who should be the bearer of bad news. Inej’s stomach clenches with a familiar sense of apprehension, one that she’s been getting when she reads Kaz’s letters for months. It’s a subtle hint that something isn’t right, but she can’t for the life of her figure out what it is.

After a moment, Anika pushes back her chair and gives her cards to Rotty. “If you make me lose, I’ll end you,” she threatens, then stands up. “Come on, Ghafa,” she says in what Inej can only assume is her lieutenant’s voice. “Let’s have a chat.”

(3)

They step out into the hallway and Anika paces to the end to look out at the garden, arms crossed.

“Anika,” Inej ventures stepping up alongside her. “What’s wrong? Did something happen to Kaz?”

“I don’t know,” Anika says, slowly and precisely, like saying each word hurts.

“What do you mean?” Inej asks.

“He’s missing,” Anika says. “No one’s seen him in days.”

“What?” Inej can’t help it, she yells. “Why aren’t you looking for him?”

“We are!” Anika’s voice raises too. “But Ketterdam’s a big place and we don’t know where half his boltholes are. To be honest, he could still be holed up in his rooms in the Slat since no one actually saw him leave. No one answers when we knock, but the door’s locked, like, really locked.” She gives Inej a significant look.

Inej nods. Kaz has more locks on his door than any person should ever need, but he rarely uses all of them because several can only be locked and unlocked from the inside. He wouldn’t have gone through that much trouble if he was just going out. “Have you tried the windows?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Anika says. “We sent Minna up the morning after we lost track of him. The windows are all locked. To make matters worse, each one’s fitted with multiple Schuyler locks. Aside from Kaz there’s only a handful of people in the gang who can pick those, and none of them are capable of getting up on that roof without killing themselves.”

Inej bites her lip. She doesn’t know what to say. This doesn’t sound like Kaz at all. She tries to decide how likely it is that he just found an intriguing job and doesn’t like the odds. “Do you think he’s on a job?”

Anika growls low in the back of her throat, and Inej looks at her. “What?”

“You haven’t been around these past couple months, Ghafa,” Anika says. “Something’s not right with him. Hasn’t been in months, but it’s gotten worse since the last time you were here. I don’t know what kind of lover’s squabble the two of you had, but while you’ve been out there gallivanting around the ocean, we’ve been here dealing with him.”

Inej opens her mouth to protest that she’s doing a lot more than gallivanting, but stops herself because she’s not sure if Anika’s on the list of people who have been trusted with the true nature of her mission.

“Pim and I are basically running the Dregs,” Anika admits, calming down. “Brekker barely does anything anymore. I don’t think he’s realized we’ve noticed, though I’m not sure how that’s possible. He’s not very aware of anything. He spends a lot of time just staring blankly off into space. He’s not scheming, but I can’t figure out what he’s actually thinking about.”

Inej doesn’t know what to say. The idea of Kaz not pulling his own weight and leading the gang he bled for for so long is ludicrous. She can’t wrap her mind around it.

“So far, only the inner circle knows exactly how bad it is,” Anika says. She sounds exhausted. “That means me, Pim, Keeg, Dirix, Rotty, Roeder and Minna. We’re trying to keep it from going farther than that, but we’re running out of time. There are low-ranking members of the Dregs who are personally loyal to Kaz, but the majority of them are only loyal to the idea of him—of Dirtyhands, Bastard of the Barrel. When they figure out what’s going on…”

She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. Inej knows the Barrel well enough to know what Anika was going to say. If word gets out that Kaz is weak the very gang that has followed him so ravenously will turn on him just like they turned on Per Haskell. If that happens, Kaz will be lucky to escape with his life.

The thought is terrifying.

“What happened before he went missing?” Inej asks Anika, trying to push the conversation away from the horrible idea of Kaz’s possibly imminent fall.

Anika sighs. “You’d do best to ask Espen that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hard to say,” Anika says. “All I know is that the night we lost track of the boss, he was supposed to go out to do some scouting with the spiders. He didn’t show up for hours. Roeder and Minna were just going to go without him, but Espen got angry and stalked upstairs. After a couple minutes he came down and said that-” she cuts herself off. “You know, you probably should talk to Espen about that, I’m not even sure I understand what went on.”

(4)

It takes Inej the better part of an hour to located Espen in the swirling mass of humanity in the Van Eck house. She’s just starting to wonder if he left without telling anyone when she runs into Minna. The young spider is more than happy to point her in Espen’s direction.

“I saw him over by the food,” she says. “Sulking probably; he hates parties.”

Inej threads through the crowd to the location specified. Espen is seated on a couch, crushed between the arm and a couple older members of the Dregs. He is clutching a plate of hors d'oeuvres and looks murderous, but he’s still there. If Kaz had been in his position, he’d have broken someone’s jaw and fled upstairs where there are less people by now.

Espen doesn’t notice her approach him, and Inej makes a mental note to tell Kaz to teach his spiders to be more observant. She waltzes up to Espen and snaps her fingers in front of his face.

He glares at her, overgrown mop of straw-colored hair falling into his angry blue eyes. Sometimes Inej looks at him and thinks that this must have been what Kaz had been like at age eleven, but other times she thinks that Kaz and Espen are only superficially alike. There is something almost theatrical about Espen’s anger, like he’s playing a part or seeking attention. She can’t imagine careful, calculating, brilliant Kaz ever acting like that.

“Wha’ do you want?” Espen asks in a low, gruff voice that might be a poor attempt at mimicking Kaz’s rasp.

“Just a chat,” Inej says and beckons with a finger. “Let’s go someplace quieter.”

(5)

She leads him into an upstairs parlor and locks the door behind them. He stands in the middle of the room, his arms crossed. “I’m waiting,” he says.

Inej rolls her eyes. “Drop the act. You’re not a hotshot. You’re just a kid.”

“I’m one of Kaz Brekker’s trusted spiders,” Espen says puffing his chest out. “I am one of the most important members of the Dregs.”

“Yes, and I’m the Wraith,” Inej says. “Do we really want to start throwing titles and accomplishments around?”

Espen visibly deflates. He either didn’t recognize her (which doesn’t make sense because she’s given him and the other spiders some tips during her visits in Ketterdam) or he was hoping she wouldn’t call him out on his bravado (much more likely). “What do you want?” he asks.

“Anika said that you and Kaz got in a fight a couple days ago,” Inej says.

“Yeah,” Espen says. “Happens all the time. Why does it matter?” There’s now something cagey about his body language. He’d rather not be talking about this.

“Why don’t you tell me about it,” Inej suggests, using the gentle, soothing voice she’s cultivated to put rescued slaves at ease.

She expects Espen to argue, but he grasps onto her offer to listen almost frantically. Whatever happened between him and Kaz has been weighing on his mind and he desperately wants to talk about it.

“I’m not a spider anymore,” he says.

That was not how she expected him to begin this conversation. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“I got fired,” Espen says, his voice is angry, but matter-of-fact in the way that only Barrel rats seem to be able to manage. As if bad things are something to be expected and taken when they come. “After the argument. Boss says he doesn’t want to see me ever again.”

That is odd. Inej has never known Kaz to tell someone he never wants to see them again. Loathe as she is to admit it, normally when he gets to that point he simply kills the person in question to ensure he doesn’t have to deal with them anymore. “What happened?” she asks slowly.

Espen shrugs, evasive anger back again. “I dunno. Brekker’s been really stupid lately.”

That sets off even more alarms in Inej’s head. She has never, ever heard the word “stupid” used in the same sentence as “Kaz Brekker.” “What do you mean?” she asks cautiously.

For a second Espen looks confused then nervous. “If Anika didn’t say anything, then maybe I shouldn’t-”

“Tell me,” Inej presses, shoving away the hurt at the idea that Anika might be keeping things from her. She and Anika aren’t exactly friends, but they’re not enemies either. Plus, Anika holds a position in the Dregs similar to the one that Kaz did when Haskell was general (albeit, with much less actual power). Of all the members of the Dregs, she’s the closest to Kaz and might be the only one who has a firm grasp on how serious Inej’s relationship with Kaz is. “Kaz is my friend,” she continues ignoring the voice that screams that she and Kaz are way past the “just friends” point. “If there’s something going on with him; I need to know about it.”

Espen sighs then relents and begins his story. Inej listens with growing shock as he relates his confrontation with Kaz. She recognizes the Kaz’s behaviors because she has seen them in people she rescues from slavers. She has seen people who lash out at every perceived threat, who see such behavior as the only way to protect themselves from a world that has turned its back on them. She has just never applied them to Kaz.

“I don’t know what was wrong with him,” Espen finishes looking confused. “Is he sick?”

“He’ll be fine,” Inej says because she doesn’t feel like trying to explain trauma to a Barrel kid who has been raised in a community that refuses to acknowledge anything but strength. “Do you know where he went after your argument?”

Espen shrugs. “Dunno. I didn’t see him go anywhere.”

“Okay,” Inej says taking a deep breath in an effort to contain her thoughts. “Thank you.”

(6)

She approaches the Slat the way she always has; by the roofs. She isn’t sure that she truly believes Kaz will be there, but she isn’t sure where else to start so she decides to take her chances.

The window she always entered Kaz’s room through, the window she often sat in feeding the crows, is closed with a dark curtain pulled down behind it. It takes her upwards of twenty minutes to figure out how to pick the Schuyler locks, but when she finally does she pulls the window open, pushes aside the curtain and steps inside.

The room is dark and cluttered which is strange because for all his money Kaz owns very little and keeps what he does in impeccable order. Now there are clothes and weapons strewn across the floor. As Inej steps inside she accidentally steps on a sheet of paper that is scrawled over on both sides in Kaz’s handwriting. A number of other sheets of paper are spread across the rest of the floor like someone threw them.

She’s just reaching the conclusion that someone must have broken into Kaz’s room and ransacked it when she realizes the room is not empty. There’s a teenage boy-sized lump in the bed and on closer investigation she realizes it’s Kaz.

She knows that Kaz sleeps on his side, curled into the fetal position with his back pressed up against the nearest wall, but she has never seen him take it quite this far. He’s curled up so tightly that he’s almost in a legitimate ball. She knows that’s bad for his leg; he’ll be lucky if he can stand let alone walk when he gets up. His coal gray blanket is pulled up so that only his hair is visible. He isn’t using a pillow and after a second she realizes that’s because he’s clutching it to his chest like it’s the only thing keeping him from drowning in a stormy ocean.

“Kaz?” she asks her voice nervous. “Kaz.” He doesn’t stir so she crosses the room trying to step around the papers in case they’re important. When she reaches his side, she kneels down next to him. “Kaz.” She says a little louder, reaching out and pulling the blanket away from his face, careful not to touch any skin. “Kaz, wake up.”

He shifts slightly, but doesn’t straighten or release his death grip on the pillow. One eye cracks open just slightly then closes again and he buries his face in the pillow.

“Kaz,” she repeats. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

He moves again, just slightly and mutters something, but the words are rendered incomprehensible by the pillow.

“Kaz!” her voice is rising panic now, she grasps his blanket-covered shoulder and shakes him. “Look at me!”

(7)

As always, the physical contact gets a response from him. He bats her hands away with a motion that is a little more haphazard than it usually would be. His eyes open and he looks at her like he can’t decide if she’s actually there. “Inej?” he asks after a moment. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” Inej says. “Why aren’t you at Jesper and Wylan’s party?”

Kaz looks away. “I’m not going,” he says.

“Yes, I’d kind of figured that out,” she says perhaps a bit sharper than she intended to. She takes a deep breath and changes her tone before she goes on. “Are you still angry at me for the last time I was here?” he doesn’t say anything so she pushes onward. “Anika said you’ve been missing for a couple days. Are you okay?”

No answer.

“Kaz,” she presses. “Are you okay?”

Still no answer. He won’t even look at her.

“Kaz!” she shouts. He jumps which might have actually been funny under different circumstances. “Enough of this. Are You Okay?” She isn’t even sure why she’s continuing on this line of questioning when he’s pretty obviously not okay and she knows that if she does convince him to talk he’ll just lie. Perhaps she just wants the reassurance of knowing that he’s at least okay enough to lie to her.

If that’s what she wants she doesn’t get it, because Kaz says nothing. He just keeps looking away, eyes vacant and dead.

Just like their argument on the roof. She’d thought how silent he’d been then was wrong. They’ve argued before, but Kaz has never been quiet and listened. When Kaz is in an argument he lays into the other person with every ounce of cruel intelligence he possesses. Before that night, Inej had never won an argument with him. She should have known right away that something was wrong, but she’d been too angry and too high on her own victory to notice.

“Kaz,” Her voice softens, almost pleading. “What’s wrong?”

Finally he looks back at her, his eyes are still dead in a way that looks nothing like the Bastard of the Barrel. “Nothing,” he says. “I’m fine.”

Even though she was expecting this she can’t help but sigh. “Tell me the truth, Kaz.”

“I was sleeping,” Kaz says in a tone of voice that’s a little too flat for his defensive words. “Nothing more.”

“It’s ten thirty,” she points out.

He raises an eyebrow. “All kinds of people go to bed before that.”

“Not you,” Inej points out. It’s true; going to bed at midnight constitutes as early for Kaz Brekker. “Come on, Kaz.”

“I’m fine,” he says. “Leave me alone and let me sleep.”

Then he curls up on the bed again with his back facing her.

(8)

She can’t get him to start talking to her again, no matter how much she pleads. When she tries shaking him again he just shoves her off and pulls the blanket over his head.

Eventually she realizes that she’s unlikely to get any response from him. She’s going to be stuck waiting for the unlikely possibility that he’ll relent and tell her what’s wrong. She stands up. “I’m going to clean up this room a little,” she tells him. “I’ll be right here if you decide you want to talk.”

Kaz doesn’t answer.

Inej sighs and sets to work on the mess Kaz has made. There’s an empty whiskey bottle lying on the floor and when she picks it up she realizes that it’s that super expensive whiskey she and Kaz stole once. Trust Kaz not to get drunk on something cheap.

She throws the bottle away, then turns to the papers spread out across the floor. After she picks up a couple she realizes they’re part of a letter. It takes her the better part of fifteen minutes to gather them all up and figure out what order they go in, but then her curiosity gets the better of her and she starts to read.

(9)

What she reads horrifies her.

If it wasn’t Kaz’s handwriting she would have thought someone else wrote it. The words don’t sound like Kaz Brekker. Kaz Brekker isn’t this open. He doesn’t talk like this. Kaz Brekker does not display this kind of abject self-hatred. Yet at the same time she knows that this horrible, untrue letter is Kaz and she knows that this is how he feels. This is what she abandoned him to without even realizing it.

She knew he had a lot armor, but she realizes now she may have given her understanding a bit too much credit. She had thought that she saw Kaz completely through the eyes of the almost eighteen-year-old woman she is now, but she realizes she was wrong. Somewhere inside of her a tiny portion of the fifteen-year-old girl she had been when Kaz rescued her from the Menagerie has been hanging on skewing her viewing of him. Back then she saw Kaz as something powerful and immortal, something strong enough to rise above the filth of Ketterdam, something that could make the monsters pay. That was what had drawn her to him in the beginning; the promise that perhaps, just perhaps he could make her something like that too.

Over the years that view of Kaz had started to die as she realized that Ketterdam took something from everyone, realized she did not need to be a monster. She’d also realized that Kaz was no demon, no immortal being, he was just a boy who had suffered trauma every bit as great as hers.

If Inej was honest with herself, Kaz had done more than just buy her indenture; he was why she wasn’t like some of the blank-eyed people she pulls out of slaver holds. From the instant she’d left the Menagerie, she’d never had the chance to sink into the blackness of her own despair because Kaz had always been there pushing her to climb a little faster, hit a little harder, to be more than that girl who’d been sold in the brothels. He had saved her, even if he’d never intended to, even if he hadn’t even realized he was doing it. She had owed him the same, and she’d failed.

She sits on the floor and presses her forehead against her knees. She’d left Ketterdam thinking that she didn’t need Kaz anymore. That is at least kind of true; she no longer relies on him to determine her identity the she once did. She’s her own personality with her own goals in her reach, but she’d forgotten to wonder whether Kaz needs her more than she needs him.

She turns to him. She doesn’t know what she’s going to say to him, but she knows that she needs to say something. “Kaz…” she whispers. He doesn’t respond, but his shoulders aren’t as tight as they were before so she thinks he’s fallen back to sleep.

She carefully pulls the blanket back around his shoulders so it’s no longer covering his face. Then she carefully steps towards the window. She isn’t sure what she needs to do to fix this and the only thing she can think of is that the only food Kaz keeps in his rooms is dry, gross stuff that doesn’t spoil. Food is like a bandage on a gaping wound, but it is something she can do right now.

Before she leaves she thinks about trying to find all Kaz’s knives and lock them up. She doesn’t know if Kaz will try to hurt himself, but she also knows that she’s unlikely to find all the knives he has hidden. She decides she’s better off just moving quickly and hoping to be back before he wakes up.

She takes one last look at his crumpled form and leaps out the window.

(10)

Her first stop is at the Van Eck mansion. She writes a note to Anika saying that she’s found Kaz, and one to Jesper and Wylan saying that something has come up and that she’ll make it up to them later. She doesn’t mention anything about the kind of shape Kaz is in. She’s not going to tell anyone about what’s going on without his blessing.

She gives the letters to one of the servants then sneaks into the kitchens. She makes off with some meat and vegetables because it will be easier than finding a shop to break into. She’ll pay Jesper and Wylan back later.

After leaving the mansion she stops by the Wraith to grab a few things. This only takes a few minutes and the crewmember on watch doesn’t even notice that she’s there. She makes a mental note to give her crew a talking to about how to be on guard duty, but right now she has bigger problems.

As she heads back to the Slat she passes by the small toy shop where she got the stuffed crow she gave to Alby Rollins before she left Ketterdam. She picks the simple lock on the backdoor and lets herself in. The shop is just as small and quaint as it was the last time she was here. She remembers belatedly that she’d promised the owner she’d convince Kaz to put this shop under Dregs protection in exchange for making the crow toy in a matter of hours. She’d forgotten in the whirlwind of preparations for her voyage. She renews that promise to herself as she looks at the wares spread out around the dark shop. She should not get in the habit of breaking her promises.

She wanders through the store looking at all the cute, fluffy stuffed toys. She isn’t exactly sure why she came here, but she feels like she needs to be here.

Eventually she stops before a rack of stuffed bears. She had a bear toy as a child. She remembers hugging it to her chest and feeling safe. She wonders briefly what happened to it when she got too old to want it anymore. Suddenly she hopes her parents didn’t get rid of it. She would like to see it again.

As she runs her fingers along the shelves of stuffed bears she wonders if Kaz ever had a toy like this. She has spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out exactly where Kaz came from. She knows that at some point in his life someone must have cared for him--he would have died as an infant if he’d been completely abandoned from the moment he was born--but she hasn’t been able to figure out who. She knows Kaz had a brother, but she doesn’t even know what his name was let alone how much older he was. Perhaps this older brother raised Kaz in the Barrel and then ran afoul of Pekka Rollins.

The only person who could answer her questions is Kaz and he’s so close-lipped about himself that it’s honestly a miracle he admitted he even had a brother. She wishes she could convince him to talk to her. She wants to help him, and talking always helps.

She shakes herself. She’s not helping Kaz by sitting in a toy shop and leaving him all alone. She starts to leave, then pauses and turns back to the rack of bears. She suddenly becomes aware of the idea that has been forming in her mind the entire time she’s been in this shop. She’s fully aware it might be a terrible idea and that he might refuse it at best and assume she’s mocking him at worst, but she feels like it’s something she needs to do.

She chooses to a medium-sized bear with a soft, cuddly body; silky, caramel-colored fur and a sweet, reassuring face that doesn’t have any uncomfortable wires in it. She sets the tag on the shop counter along with twice the kruge the owner is charging and slides the bear into a bag she took from Jesper and Wylan’s.

She leaves the shop, locking the door carefully behind her. Then she takes a deep breath, collects herself and takes to the rooftops for the journey back to the Slat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will tell you all the same thing I told the people on ff.net when I originally published this chapter: that teddy bear is pretty much all the fluff you'll ever get out of me.


	4. Part Four

Part Four

**(Kaz)**

(26)

When Kaz wakes up, he’s no longer curled around his pillow. The pillow is in fact under his head in its proper place, supporting his admittedly sore neck. He’s still clutching something, however. It’s soft and silky and a little foreign. Kaz isn’t sure how he got it, though he does have vague memories of someone taking the pillow away.

He opens his eyes and realizes the thing he’s holding is a stuffed bear, like the kind that small children carry. He stares at it in muted shock, trying to figure out where it came from.

“I thought you might want something other than your pillow to cuddle with,” a familiar voice says.

Kaz jolts upright and whirls to face the voice. Inej is standing in the doorway of his bedroom watching him.

“When did you get here?” Kaz asks caught somewhere between panic and confusion. He can’t figure out why she’s here. She isn’t due to be in Ketterdam for a few more days, is she? Not to mention that he doesn’t understand why she’d be in his rooms even if she had arrived early.

“Yesterday morning,” Inej said. “When you didn’t show up at the party last night I was worried and came looking for you.”

The party had been last night? Kaz wonders how long he’s been holed up in this room. Unfortunately, now that he knows when Inej arrived in Ketterdam he has to face the more confusing question, “Why did you come looking for me? I thought you didn’t want to see me anymore.”

Inej’s face goes slack with shock, she stares at him like she’s never seen him before. “Kaz, when did I ever say that?”

“You-You-” Kaz’s eyes dart around the room as he tries to think of the right answer. Normally this would come easily to him, but today he can barely think about anything. “You were angry,” he says quietly. He sounds pathetic and hates himself for it. “I thought that you-” he trails off unable to force the rest of the sentence over his lips.

Inej stares at him in shock. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she says.

He looks away. He doesn’t trust people. He hasn’t since Pekka Rollins destroyed his life. He wishes that he could say that Inej is the exception to that, but it seems that she’s actually not.

“Kaz,” He glances up. Inej has crossed the room and is standing over him. She doesn’t touch him, but it looks like she wants to. “I swear I didn’t mean it like that.”

He nods. It’s all he can do.

(27)

“Are you hungry?” Inej asks after the silence between them has dragged on for far too long.

Kaz shrugs.

“You should eat something,” Inej says in a brisk, leader’s voice she didn’t have before she ran off to become a pirate. “You’ll feel better with something in your stomach.”

Kaz highly doubts that, but he doesn’t feel like trying to argue with her. “Okay.”

Inej leaves the room looking weirdly like she’s moving with brisk purpose and running for her life at the same time. Kaz lies back down and hugs the bear again even though needing comfort from anything, especially something made of fabric and stuffing, is weak and shameful.

Inej comes back after a few minutes with two bowls of something in her hands. She holds one out to him, hand thoughtfully positioned so he can take the bowl without risking their fingers touching. “Here,” she says. “It’s one of my mother’s recipes.”

Kaz sits up, carefully takes the bowl and looks down at it. He’s eaten precious little Suli food in his life because there are not many restaurants or food carts in Ketterdam that sell it. While she was his spider, whenever Inej wanted Suli food she’d run off on her own without inviting him, so he figured it was an experience he wasn’t allowed to share in. Honestly, he didn’t know she could cook, though she’s so terrifyingly formidable in everything else he probably shouldn’t be surprised.

He takes a bite and it’s not bad, which if you control for his utter lack of appetite means it’s probably pretty amazing. “Thank you,” he says and he’s not sure if he’s thanking her for the food or for simply existing and coming back to him after everything he’s ever done wrong.

(28)

“Why didn’t you go to Jesper and Wylan’s party?” Inej asks when she finishes eating.

Kaz stares down at the half-full bowl in his hands. “Didn’t feel like it,” he says.

“Kaz…” she says. “I read that letter you wrote. The one that was lying on the floor.”

He cringes and looks away. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

“Why?” Inej asks. “Why wasn’t I supposed to see that? Because it was honest? Because it was vulnerable? Because it was something other than the Dirtyhands mask?”

Kaz can’t look at her, he bites into his lip until he tastes blood. “Because I don’t want you to leave,” he says.

There’s a stunned pause, then Inej pads over and kneels on the floor next to the bed, directly in his line of sight. “Kaz,” she says looking up into his face, “why would I leave if you told me you felt like that?”

“I-I-” Kaz struggles to find the words to explain. “You told me that you would have me without armor or not at all. I can’t do that. I’ve tried, but I can’t. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.”

“You have to give it time,” Inej says. “It won’t get better all at once.”

“No, you don’t understand!” Kaz snaps, suddenly angry. He’s on his feet and halfway across the room before he realizes he’s decided to move. “You think I’ve never tried to get over this before? I’ve turned every other weakness I have into something useful; you think I didn’t try to do the same with this? But it’s never gotten better! It’s never going to get better!” His face screws up into something that he at first thinks is a snarl, but his vision is blurring over, and his cheeks are wet and he realizes he’s crying again.

Normally–though admittedly this situation would never happen normally–this would be when he drives Inej out of his rooms until he has better control of himself. However, today he’s more afraid of her never coming back than he is of her seeing him disgusting and weak, so he doesn’t say anything. He just staggers backwards until his back hits the wall and slides down to huddle in the corner, his knees drawn up and arms wrapped around himself.

He’s vaguely aware of Inej gaping at him from the other side of the room. He can imagine her struggling to figure out how to comfort someone she can’t touch. He almost expects her to just leave him to cry himself out, then the floorboards creak as she makes her careful way over to him. She sits down against the wall a handful of feet distant and holds the stuffed bear out to him. He takes it almost without thinking and buries his face in its soft fur.

For a while the only sound is his own soft sobs, then Inej says, so quietly he almost doesn’t hear it, “I’m sorry, Kaz. I’m so, so sorry.”

(29)

“Thank you for the bear,” he says a long while later, awkwardly stroking the toy’s soft ears in a sentimental way that would have humiliated him if he had any energy to spare. His eyes are puffy, his head aches and his nose is stuffed with snot. He’s decided that he hates crying and wishes that he’d never regained the ability to do it.

“Have you ever had one?” Inej asks.

She speaks casually, but it’s still a loaded question, one Kaz normally wouldn’t answer. Perhaps it’s his current emotional state, perhaps it’s because he feels like he owes her for coming back, but today his response is a little different. “Yes,” he says. “Not a store bought one, though; we were too poor for that. My mom made one for me out of old socks or something. I left it behind when Jordie and I came to Ketterdam.”

There’s a pause while Inej absorbs the information. “You weren’t actually born in Ketterdam?” she finally asks.

He starts, realizing that he gave away more information than he intended. He almost snaps at her not to overstep her boundaries, but then sighs and shakes his head. “No.”

He waits tensely for Inej to take advantage of him and to force him to talk about things that he doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t. She just sits quietly and looks at him with an expression of understanding. For a second, he’s confused then he realizes that of course Inej understands why he lies about being from Ketterdam. She’s from Ravka, she knows all too well the kind of pushback people who come to the Barrel from other places receive from people who were born there. Of course, she understands why it was conducive to Kaz’s plans to pretend to be a Barrel rat, especially since no one would have been able to confirm his claims anyway.

A slight bit of the heaviness in his chest vanishes as it sinks in that Inej understands and that she’s not going to use his weakness against him.

“Thank you for telling me that,” Inej says, very calmly and very respectfully. As he looks at her he feels one corner of his mouth lift into a tiny smile, and Inej gives him a small smile in return.

(30)

“Thank you,” he says, after a long but comfortable silence. “For coming back.”

She looks at him, steadily and seriously. “I will always come back. Hunting slavers matters to me, but you do too. No matter where in the world I am, no matter what I’m doing, if you need me I will come,” she says. “I promise.”

He almost starts crying again but holds the tears back by sheer will. Hopefully his normal emotionless state will come back when all of this is over, this is just humiliating. “Thank you,” he whispers.

“But you need to promise me something in return,” Inej says, and Kaz looks away, of course she wants something; everyone always does.

“Kaz, look at me,” Inej says. He lifts his head to make eye contact. She leans forward slightly, eyes dark and earnest. “Kaz, you need to promise that if you need me, you’ll actually tell me. I can’t read your mind, and I’ll feel a million times better when I’m off on the high seas if I know that you’ll actually write me and say, ‘Inej, I need you to come home and be with me’ instead of just letting yourself go under.” she pauses for a moment to let her request sink in then says, “Can you do that for me?”

“I can,” Kaz says. “I promise.”

A look of relief crosses Inej’s face. “Thank you,” she breathes.

“I love you,” the words are out of Kaz’s mouth before he even considers saying them. He jerks back in surprise. Deep down inside, he has known that he is in love with her since he almost drowned during the Ice Court job, but he has never considered actually telling her.

Inej looks shocked, and Kaz tries to backpedal. “I-I didn’t mean to-” he can’t think. He doesn’t know what to say. “I just-”

“Kaz,” Inej cuts in. He stops and sucks in a shaky breath, staring at her. She reaches out and gently takes his gloved hands. She squeezes them hard, looks straight into his eyes and says, “I love you too.”

(31)

Neither of them really says anything after that confession. They just sit quietly together holding hands for a long, long time. Eventually Kaz must doze off, because when he wakes up its dark. He’s lying with his torso parallel to the wall, legs bent up towards his chest, and a blanket covering him. Inej is curled up on the floor as well with another blanket wrapped around her. In all their years of working together, this is the closest they have ever slept; she is close enough to touch.

One of Inej’s hands pokes out from under her blanket. Kaz snakes one arm out from his blanket and stretches across the space between them. He touches her wrist with the very tips of his fingers just to prove that she is there and that he can touch her. He’s not sure if she feels him, but she shifts slightly and sighs. He smiles, draws his hand back into his cocoon of blankets, then tucks his head down and goes back to sleep.

(32)

The next day, after they finally wake up in the late morning Inej forces him to wash and dress and eat something. Then they climb through the window of his room and travel a couple blocks by rooftop. Then they climb down and approach the Slat again on foot.

Everyone looks up when they step through the door. Anika sees him and practically melts into the floor with relief. “Boss,” she says in a tone of voice that suggests that she might be attempting to conceal her emotion and just failing miserably. “Nice to see you again.”

“Anika,” Kaz says with a nod. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Espen attempting to hide behind Roeder and isn’t even surprised that the kid’s still around.

“Where’ve you been, Brekker?” Teapot asks stepping into Kaz’s space in a way that is vaguely threatening. Kaz knows where this is going and the thought of exerting his dominance is exhausting.

Kaz shrugs and hopes he looks normal. “Around,” he says. “I had something to take care of.” Let them figure out what he means by that, because he definitely doesn’t know.

“Really?” Teapot leans in even closer, until Kaz can smell his breath and his skin crawls like it’s covered in live spiders. “And was it something that was at least a little helpful to this gang?”

Kaz feels Inej tense next to him. She can tell he’s tired and is ready to deal with the situation for him. The thought is tempting, but he can’t let her do it. It would only make things worse in the long run. He stops her with a barely perceptible gesture, then flicks a knife out of his sleeve and stabs it into Teapot’s shoulder.

Teapot cries out in surprise, and Kaz twists the knife, driving Teapot to his knees. Kaz leans over the bigger boy, teeth bared. “I forgave you for that night with Per Haskell, Teapot,” he snarls. “Don’t make me rethink that.” Teapot looks like he’s going to wet himself.

Kaz holds him like that for another second or two then straightens up and yanks the knife out of Teapot’s shoulder. Teapot crumbles to curl up in the fetal position on the floor. Kaz steps over him and heads for the downstairs office. Inej follows without a word.

Kaz gets to the door and pulls out his keys to unlock the door. His hands are steady and that shocks him because he feels like he should be shaking. He unlocks the door and pulls it open. The instant before he heads inside he glances back at the rest of the room, which is staring wide eyed. “Also, I know you’re here, Espen,” he says. “I’m not blind.” Then he heads into the office.

(33)

Once the office door closes behind them, Kaz crosses the room in a couple strides and tosses the knife onto the desk, not caring if he gets blood on the couple inches of paperwork that cover it like snow drifts. He sinks into the big chair behind the desk and leans his head back. He closes his eyes and sighs.

“Are you okay?” Inej asks quietly.

He shrugs.

After a moment, Inej crosses the room on careful feet. He opens his eyes to watch her move some of the papers and hitch herself up onto the desk. She picks up the knife and begins to clean it, which is a bit unusual because she always makes him clean his own knives.

They sit in silence for several minutes, the someone knocks on the door. Kaz attempts to sit up straighter and look alert. “Come in,” he calls.

Anika pushes the door open and steps inside. She closes the door tightly behind her before she says anything. “Can I talk to you for a moment, Boss?” she asks.

“Sure,” Kaz says.

Anika’s eyes cut to Inej. “Alone, please, Boss.”

Inej tenses, her fingers tightening around the hilt of the knife.

“Okay,” Kaz says and glances up at Inej. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be right outside if you need me,” Inej says. She hops off the desk, hands him the knife and leaves the office.

Kaz watches her go then turns his attention to Anika. “Yes?” he asks.

“I just…” Anika looks like she has no idea what to say. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You vanished pretty suddenly.”

“I’m fine,” Kaz says. He wants to sound angry, but he’s pretty sure it just comes out as tired.

“Where were you?” Anika pushes.

“None of your business.”

“I think it is,” she says jutting out her chin. “I’m your most trusted lieutenant.”

“And I’m perfectly capable of killing you and replacing you with someone else.”

Anika sighs and looks away. “Okay, Boss. You don’t trust me, I get it; but that’s not something you need to be worried about.”

“And why’s that?” Kaz asks.

“I don’t want to be general,” Anika says in a rush, like this is something she’s been waiting to get off her chest. “I have no aspirations for your job and I never will, but I will fight alongside you and kill anyone who tries to take the Dregs from you. You have my word.”

Kaz can’t completely keep from recoiling in surprise. He didn’t expect that sentiment from anyone in the Dregs and didn’t expect anyone to announce it either. “How do I know you’re telling the truth and not just trying to get me to let my guard down?” he asks.

“I’m telling the truth,” Anika says, which isn’t really an answer. Her gaze is steady and earnest, though, and against his better judgement Kaz finds that he believes her. Perhaps he really is just desperate for someone other than Inej who isn’t going to stab him in the back.

“Your feelings are noted,” he says before he loses his precarious control of both the situation and himself. “Now get out.”

The smile Anika gives him is actually fond and its terrifying. “As you wish, Boss.”

(34)

He and Inej spend the rest of the day holed up in his office attempting to work through the vast stacks of paperwork he’s been neglecting. Inej understands how to do a surprising amount of it even though he’s never invested the time in teaching her. He supposes that being the captain of a pirate ship isn’t all boarding ships on the high seas.

When the sun starts to go down, Inej decides that they’re going to see Jesper and Wylan. Kaz tries to argue, but Inej refuses to be swayed. It shouldn’t be possible to drag someone without touching them, but somehow, she manages it.

Its fully dark by the time they get to the Van Eck mansion. They go up to the front door and Inej rings the bell. It feels bizarre to be entering the house legitimately instead of sneaking in through a window.

Evidently, Inej didn’t think to warn Jesper and Wylan that she was bringing the Bastard of the Barrel for a visit, because Jesper looks genuinely shocked when he opens the door. He looks Kaz up and down, and his face sours with worry. “You’ve lost weight,” he says. “Have you been sick?”

“I’m fine,” Kaz growls.

“You’re sure? You look kind of-”

“Jesper,” Inej says quellingly. Kaz glares at her; she doesn’t need to fight his battles for him.

Jesper takes obvious note of the exchange. “Maybe you two should come in instead of standing there on the step,” he says. “Strictly speaking, the neighbors don’t know we’re friends with members of Barrel gangs. Someone called the  _stadwatch_  on our party, thinking it was some kind of riot.”

“Maybe it was a good thing I left then,” Inej says with a small smile. Kaz realizes that she left the party to go looking for him when he was just hiding in his room being pathetic. The thought makes him feel uncharacteristically guilty.

(35)

They end up setting up shop in the parlor with tea and coffee. Wylan starts rambling about new explosives he’s developing, which is shocking because Kaz had assumed that Wylan was done with breaking the law after the Ice Court job.

Eventually, Jesper and Inej get up and wander out of the room to see about getting some actual food. Kaz has mostly tuned Wylan out, so it takes him a moment to notice when the merchling stops talking.

“What?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re not okay,” Wylan says. “Don’t try to argue with me; it’s obvious, and I think I might understand why.”

“Why?” Kaz asks mostly to get the conversation over with.

“Jesper once told me that nothing stops you,” Wylan said. “He said that if you need to do something you’ll keep going until the job is done or you die, whichever happens first. He was right, wasn’t he? And you don’t deal with emotional stuff either, do you? Whenever something bothers you, you just keep going and pretending its not there until you can’t anymore, and once that happens you don’t know how to make it better.”

He’s surprisingly right and Kaz doesn’t know how to respond.

Wylan takes a deep breath. “I’m not a hundred percent sure where I’m going with this, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that that’s really not a good idea, and I think you know it. I think you know that things need to change, and I want you to know that Jesper and I are always here, and we’d like it if you stopped pretending we don’t like you.”

Normally Kaz would say something biting to maintain face, but tonight he just looks at Wylan for a minute, then says, “Thank you.”

(36)

He and Wylan sit quietly for a minute, then Wylan says. “I’m glad you showed up here tonight, Kaz, I have something I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

“What do you need?” Kaz asks, and belatedly realizes that he sounds extremely unenthusiastic, he winces and tries to backpedal. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You should never apologize,” Wylan says. “It doesn’t suit you.”

Kaz snorts in spite of himself. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says. “What did you want to ask?”

“Maybe I should wait until you’re feeling better,” Wylan says.

“I’m not sick,” Kaz snaps before the merchling can get any ideas about thinking he’s vulnerable, regardless of whether or not he actually is. “Ask.”

Wylan frowns and for a second Kaz thinks he’s not going to ask anyway, then he says, “I want to join the Dregs.”

It takes a second for Kaz to comprehend what he’s asking. “What?”

“I want to join the Dregs officially,” Wylan says. “Tattoo and everything.”

Kaz doesn’t have a clue how to deal with this, this is something he’s never considered before even in passing. “Have you talked to Jesper about this?” he asks because it’s the only thing he can think of to say.

Wylan’s face pinches. “This is about me and no one else.”

Kaz sighs. “You know, that’s not going to make the Dregs like you more,” he says. “They’re still going to see you as a mercher no matter what you do. Not to mention if the other merchers figure out about it, you’ll never be able to do legitimate business again.”

“If you don’t want me to join up, Kaz, just say it,” Wylan says tightly.

“I don’t want you to join without knowing what you’re getting into,” Kaz says, a little unsure about why he’s putting up a fight. Why does it matter if Wylan is deluding himself? Wouldn’t it actually be better for Kaz if Wylan was a member of the Dregs? It would give him more leverage over him.

“I’ve thought about all that already,” Wylan said. “I don’t care. I already went to the Ice Court and back with you. I’m already tied to the Dregs, I just want it to be official.”

Kaz studies Wylan while the merchling stares earnestly back at him. He realizes with some uncomfortable surprise that this is the same thing as Anika did this afternoon. This is Wylan declaring his solidarity, and Kaz isn’t sure how to do deal with it.

He looks away and clears his throat. “Alright,” he says. “If that’s what you want. I’ll find a tattoo artist we can trust to stay quiet—this is probably something that should stay on the downlow—and we’ll get you sworn in.”

(37)

Inej sticks close in the days and weeks that follow. She forces him to eat and change and helps him do his work. He soaks up her attention and he hates himself for it.

“I got Matthias killed,” he says to Inej one day when they’re in his office doing paperwork.

After years of this kind of arrangement, he knows that she’s used to the way their conversation tends to fade in and out of existence in these moments, but obviously that wasn’t something she was expecting him to say. She starts, nearly dropping her knife, and stares at him. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“I lead him to his death,” Kaz says. It hurts to say it, but somehow it also feels good to get it off his chest. “I knew that the chances that nothing bad would happen to him, me or Kuwei during that auction scheme were astronomical, I should have made sure he was more aware of that.”

There’s a long pause while Inej thinks about what to say, then she takes a deep breath and says, “Perhaps you have a point, but Matthias got out of the church and to the hospital just fine. He only met the person who killed him after he went off alone and deviated from the plan. That’s not your fault. Besides, he knew the risks of the scheme. We all did. None of us needed you to tell us that chances were we might not all make it out.”

“He was still my responsibility,” Kaz says. “You all were.” That’s something he would never say to anyone but Inej.

“That’s the curse of being a leader,” she says. He can tell that after her time as captain of  _The Wraith_  she knows exactly how he feels. “Sometimes bad things happen to the people you’re in charge of, and you have to figure out how to live with it afterwards.”

They sit in silence for a long, long time after that.

(38)

Several weeks late, the water laps up against the docks of Fifth Harbor and the moon shines down as Kaz and Inej walk along the docks on their way back to the Barrel after a night of spying. The scent of the harbor and ashes washes over them. Kaz tries to push away the memory of the Reaper’s Barge, but Inej is humming softly her face lifted to the wind. She misses the sea.

“You know, you don’t have to stay here with me,” He forces the words out before he can think better of it. “I bought you that ship for a reason.”

“I want to make sure you’re okay,” She says. “I won’t abandon you again.”

“By staying here with me you’re abandoning a lot of slaves,” Kaz points out.

“I don’t want to leave unless I’m sure you’re going to be here when you get back,” Inej says.

At that moment, Kaz realizes just how worried she’s been. The thought hurts because he never meant to burden her. “As long as I know you’re going to be back, I’ll be fine,” he says.

Inej studies his face for a long moment. “What bothers me, Kaz, is that you didn’t tell anyone that something was wrong,” she says quietly. “Okay, so you were worried that I was angry at you, but it bothers me that when the thing you most desperately needed was not to be alone—don’t argue with me, we both know that’s true—that you still didn’t seek anyone out.”

Kaz isn’t sure how to answer that.

“I know you don’t trust anyone,” Inej says, “but you can trust Jesper and Wylan. I think you know that.”

“They’re your friends and not mine,” he says a little tightly.

“They’re your friends too,” Inej says sharply. “They will both bend over backwards for you. Jesper made me promise to make sure that you come back to visit. He’s really worried about you.”

“Inej-” he begins.

“Kaz,” she stops him. “I’m not enough to just fix all your problems. You can’t base your mental health on whether or not I’m around. You need to find a way to make sure that you’ll be okay no matter where I am.”

“Inej, I’m not trying to keep you here,” Kaz says. “You can leave if you want.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Inej says. “I want to know that you’ll be okay no matter what happens. I want you to promise that you’ll hang out with Jesper and Wylan and I want you to promise that you’ll be honest about how you feel. Can you promise me that?”

Kaz stares at her for a minute, then he nods, “I promise.”

(39)

When she eventually does decide to leave again, she and Kaz spend a long, long time standing on the dock staring out at the water.

“Write me,” Inej finally says. “And I don’t just mean with information. Tell me what’s going on, how you’re feeling. If you ever end up with a letter like that one again, I want you to send it this time.”

“If you’ll do the same,” Kaz says.

“I will,” she says. “Also, tell me how Wylan’s initiation goes. Has he told Jesper yet?”

“I have no idea,” Kaz says. “But I have no intention of being anywhere in the vicinity when that conversation takes place.”

They both laugh, then fade back into silence until one of Inej’s crewmembers yells to her that they need to get going before the tides turn against them. She takes a deep breath and turns to him. “Are you going to be okay?” she asks for what has to be the hundredth time in the last few days.

“I’ll be fine,” Kaz says and he means it this time. “Go save your slaves, I’ll be waiting right here when you get back.”

“I will always come back,” she promises.

“I know,” he says. “I love you.”

She takes his hands and squeezes hard. “I love you too.” She doesn’t try to kiss him, and that’s okay; they don’t need to do that right now. Maybe they will someday; but they know they love each other, they don’t need to kiss to prove it.

(40)

When the moment is over, she lets go and leaves. Months later she comes back, and comes back again, and again, and again, and again, over and over throughout the years. She comes back in spite of storms, and slaver plots, and heists and gang wars, and in spite of those storms, and slaver plots, and heists and gang wars Kaz is always there waiting, because that is what they do.

They never stop fighting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the long wait. I've never been quite certain I like the end (parts 38-40), and I'd been getting so many positive comments I started worrying I was going to ruin the story. Eventually I convinced myself to just post this last part and get it over with, so hopefully you're all happy with the ending.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Emjen


End file.
